Unused airline ticket honored 19 years later

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United Airlines has decided to honor a 19-year-old ticket, although the US carrier was under no legal obligation to do so despite the "forever" sale condition.

John Walker found the unused ticket under the bed in his master room last month.

To participate his brother-in-law’s wedding, he had booked a non-refundable trip from Nashville to Sacramento on December 31, 1998.

However, he didn’t get to the wedding and put the ticket away in a box since he had no travel plans at the time and completely forgot about it.

Then, Walker’s family moved from Tennessee to North Carolina and he slid a box under the bed in his master room.

As the ticket said in the conditions that “domestic wholly unused non-refundable tickets can forever be applied toward the purchase of another domestic non-refundable ticket, for the customer named on the ticket,” Walker decided to figure out if “forever” can still apply 20 years later.

Walker told WEMY television that he had not decided which city to go with the ticket. /VCG Photo

However, in the past two decades, many things have changed and United Airlines literally is not the same airline that it was back then.

Walker was quoted by The Independent as saying that no one at United's customer service department knew what to do because paper tickets had long been abandoned.

Instead, he sent a message on Twitter and learned that the credit was no longer valid since United went into bankruptcy in 2010 and merged with Continental the same year. Due to a binding agreement, the company had to absolve all of the outstanding debts, including his forever ticket.

But United decided eventually that the situation was unique and the company should honor the credit.

Walker has sent the company the old ticket and is still waiting for an electronic voucher, which is technically now valued at 571.60 US dollars based on an inflation calculation.

The experience of opening the old box made him realize that many things in the past 20 years have changed.

“When I found this box and when I held it, all of those memories and things came back,” he told the WEMY television.